Content Writing, The Structure and The Process
Written by: Don Miller
Posted on February 1, 2008
Filed Under Starting your Online Business
Now that my gal pal is content with a few moments of quality time lets continue where we left off in my last post. Hopefully, you have identified who you are as a content writer for your home based business. I promised to show how I write a post, so lets get it started. I try to answer 2 questions with every post I write. What’s in it for them? (readers) and What’s in it for me? Surprised? Don’t be, we all do it even of we don’t ask ourselves the questions. When we force ourselves to focus on the outcome, our writing becomes more effective. When we write we are looking to change the behavior of the reader. We write for reaction to our words
I set a self imposed deadline on the majority of my posts of one hour. Some of the larger articles take more time, but the majority I pound out in an hour at the keyboard. Oddly, some of the most read posts I have written were composed in less than an hour, so much for being perfect. I break down my time like this:
- Planning 20 minutes
- Writing 30 minutes
- Polishing 10 minutes
When I say planning 20 minutes I mean actually outlining the article. I am a compulsive thinker. I don’t not turn the radio on in my car, seldom watch TV and find time to think incessantly. Darn I just wrote that and thought to myself, Don you are a nut job!
Writing usually flows easily once I begin, in large part because most of it is in my head from the planning. This part is usually easy for me.
Polishing is usually accomplished rather quickly as I have learned I will spend more time trying to make it perfect than it took me to write it.
For the most part just about any legitimate home based business correspondence falls into 3 categories.
Inform
Persuade
Build Relationships
Inform
This is probably the category where most of my posts are structured. For example, as I began to write this post, I decided to use a new trial subscription to Wordze that I recently purchased. As is my custom when I offer products on my site, I buy them myself. The reason is I don’t want to promote something I have no idea about just for the sake of making money on a commission. The last thing I need is someone becoming disgruntled over a product I essentially endorsed. Long gone are the days when I sign up for any free affiliate programs. As it turns out Wordze is an amazing tool for obtaining keywords for articles. The program provides information on latest search frequency and among other things, competition for the words you have selected. Within a minute I literally had over 700 keywords for this article alone. Can you find them? They are here.
Persuade
Properly formatted your article should persuade the reader to take an action. Maybe an RSS subscription, a Newsletter offer, perhaps a new legitimate affiliate program. I freely admit this is not my strength. If it was you might be seeing my RSS count chicklet by now. Still persuasive writing is a must and learning how to do it properly takes time and experience.
Persuasive writing prompts the reader. Sometimes persuasive writing appeals to the reader. Regular readers of Copyblogger see some of the best examples of persuasive writing on the internet. Again using Wordze I was able to come up with a few words for this paragraph. Perhaps you could leave a comment and tell me where they are. This might have been the best $7.95 I have spent lately. The trial lasts a week , but I can see myself easily becoming a regular subscriber.
Building Relationships
Meet people where they are, not where you expect them to be. Now this is where I live. I feel right at home here, because building relationships is the most important thing you can do with any business. I have a very simple philosophy when it comes to building relationships. I meet people where they are. I then find out where they want to go. Finally I do everything in my power to help them get there. I am often troubled by the bloggers who purposefully attack other bloggers for having different points of view or communicating in a different way. Long before bloggers were bloggers; they were people. Some don’t treat them that way, do they? I try to be as transparent as I possibly can be in all my posts. I want people to know who I am on the inside and out. I understand my style wont appeal to everyone, and I wish I could change that. I cannot and I got over it in my 30’s. I received a correspondence this morning in fact where a blogger told me she might take a differing point of view on a recent article, but she wouldn’t have even told me if we didn’t have some semblance of a relationship formed already.
Time! This article was written in a bit over an hour, the result of my relentless pursuit of perfection. I still fall into that trap, but I seemingly missed the mark again, we don’t want readers to read, absorb and forget. We want reaction. It’s your turn now.
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Tags:, home based business, niche, writing
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11 Responses to “Content Writing, The Structure and The Process”
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Content Writing, The Structure and The Process…
Well now that my girlfreind is over her anger at putting my dog before her, Cody really is a good dog, I have finished up what was supposed to be a monster post with this part 2 of my previous post. It details how I do it, how I structure it and the ti…
Well, I have to admit - it takes me a bit longer to do my posting (as a rule) as sometimes I spend a few hours researching the topic, testing etc., as I generally write on technical subject
But a regular post - yeah. You nailed it !
Alex , like I said my planning time is somewhat skewed as I often think about a direction I want to go, I think , research and write, just like when I was in school, researched properly I am ready to write
KWs?: ‘persuasive writing’,in that one paragraph. Are there more, besides your whole page kws?
Yes Mike there are a few more, keyword phrases actually, thanks for stopping in.
Hi Don,
Thanks, this is lucid and valuable.
I’m not so sure about being persuasive though. The Brian Clark kind of writing just annoys me - I filter out the hype and concentrate on the content. Those active verbs blah blah blah that don’t add anything to what is being said just become noise for me after a while.
My approach to persuasion is to try and say how something works and how I’ve benefited if appropriate.
I like your blog because it avoids that hypey style of writing. (Note of possible relevance: I’m Australian not American.)
Evan , thanks for the kind word , yes I suppose Americans are hype crazy and perhaps that makes a difference, I would encourage anyone to filter through the hype and look for the value, as I’m sure you already do. We all persuade in one form or another, as I said I’m not good at it.
So I think that a big part of writing posts is to get all your ideas out before you polish. You touched on that, but you should enforce the idea that if you stop every paragraph to edit, polish, and re-type, you will kill your creative vibe and writing mood.
I find it easier to just write as much as I can while what I want to say is in my mind. Once I have all the ideas typed out, I then go back through and clean it up.
Great post though Don.
I don’t know. I usually don’t go back and polish anything. I think that sometimes the polish removes some of the gritty edges you want to keep for emphasis.
Rt , Polishing for me is usually typos, anymore than that takes me out of it and I don’t want that,
Wish I could churn out well-written articles an hour at a time.. Guess I’m just going to have to practise more.